How do you deal with writer's block?

[Bedrockgames]

I ran an Eberron one-shot a few months ago. A few months before that, I ran a 10-session adventure that ended when I moved out of state. Since then, I've just been trying to come up with something believable for a long campaign.

I can link scenarios well, but lately I've been overly-concerned with D&D cliches and shallow NPC motivations. When I write, i intially think the idea I'm working on is interesting, but soon find myself thinking "this is lame", or "nobody would do that", and I scrap the idea.

Maybe I'm struggling with complexity.

The first campaign I ever ran was deep, complex, and dramatic. My players still regard it as their favorite. Minimal railroading - but the NPCs felt real and vibrant. Their goals made sense. The world was vast. The problems were believable.

I seem to have trouble achieving that level of maturity in my recent works.

Okay. I think the issue may be that you are overly critical of your material. This happened to me at one point. Where I had a series of really, really excellent campaigns, and I got it into my head that everything I did needed to be good enough to bronze for the ages. Once I started thinking this way, it stifled my creativity. It wasn't until I gave myself permission to just prepare, no matter how mediocre or uninspired the stuff seemed, that I started getting creative again.

Also, keep in mind, your players probably won't really notice. In my experience, the stuff that I thought of as mediocre, the players really liked. In fact, once I allowed myself to be a little less original with my adventures, I think the players had more fun, because I was more focused on what worked game-wise than on what made me feel proud of my creativity.

So my advice. Just prepare material, don't worry about how original or cool it seems. You just need to get back into a flow. Once your not thinking so much about it anymore, inspiration will come.

 

[Storm Raven]

What I have always found useful is not merely to sit down and write, but write something else. Don't write the adventure. Instead write some campaign background - an NPC personality, an organization, some ritual one sect of a religion does, or something. Keep writing stuff. Since you are just adding background, you don't have to write about any particular aspect, or even anything that you plan on using at any foreseeable point. Eventually, your brain will work its way back to the adventure and you'll find that it is a lot easier to hammer that out.

 

[Crothian]

I agree with Storm Raven. I try write one thing for about an hour and then as the pool starts to dry up on ideas on that I will switch to something else that also needs done. I keep the advnutre open in Word (or whatever you are writing in) and then I come back to it as ideas spring to mind. Maybe I'll get a page or a pargraph more in between ideas but every little bit helps.

 

[Derulbaskul]

Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (Building-Block Adventure Design)

The above article is one of the Dungeoncraft series by James Wyatt and suggests writing adventures as three encounter "delves".

I find it's one of the best ways of breaking writer's block when designing an adventure: even at my driest, I can normally string together three encounters. At least then I have something to work with: I am happy to run with three encounters and expand "on the fly" if I need the adventure for my next sessions or, better still, to revisit when I am in a more creative mood (normally accomplished after getting some sunshine and exercise).

The "five room dungeon" model can serve a similar purpose.

Something that also really helped for me recently was playing again. I played two four-hour LFR games, the first time I have played rather than DMed since 1985. I really enjoyed it and I got home busting to write up more stuff for my own games (in part because it was affirmation that my DMing skills aren't as a bad as I think!).

 

[TheAuldGrump]

My suggestion is to daydream, think about what heroics your character would enjoy doing, what prince/princesses he/she might be rescuing, and what plot tricks would make you grind your teeth.

This is not at all the method that I use, since I tend to start with an idea for a few arcs, then combine them in a flowchart/timeline. Basically 'what the bad guys will do if the heroes don't trounce them'. Be ready to modify any timeline - bad guys can rush things (and make mistakes while doing so), heroes can kill/apprehend some essential villain or another, or otherwise cause the grand scheme to require reworking.

Then again, I don't suffer from writer's block so much as writer's sphere... too danged many ideas, and a need to organize them. There is an important stage of scenario design that I call 'spinning my wheels' or 'running around in circles'.

The Auld Grump, going through that now for a Spycraft/Gargoyles/Steampunk game - I have put off running the game for over two years, and am starting it in a month. Currently one major and three minor arcs....